Brand building during the Cup - Commerciaising the passion ?
Almost any brand linked to the 2010 FIFA World Cup is bound to be taken notice of, depending on how well it utilises its opportunities. With the event in its opening stages, brands should be using never-before seen technology and installations in visible spaces to highlight their product.
The message should be clear and the effect memorable as this the event offers high-profile exposure of a kind that only rolls around once every four years.
The brand, which received the most kudos in the previous World Cup, was Brand Germany - unemployment dropped, tourism numbers soared, investor confidence and exports increased. South Africa can grow her brand by pulling off an event that unites the nation and shows off the country in a positive light.
Through sponsorship, brand holders associate their brand with an activity, which enjoys and attracts public and media attention, thus enhancing the reputation and public awareness of the brand. Our group sponsors many arts, cultural and sporting events believing in the power that these activities foster in the various communities.
Online brand building
It is also vital that brands use keywords and relevant phrases on various online platforms such as search engines, Twitter and Facebook, to ensure their brands are also associated online with the event. By targeting popular online search terms, official sponsors can attract traffic to their websites. Some companies have built websites using Flash, making them hard for search engines to pick up and link World Cup information. Brands invest heavily in their sponsorships and should target all angles to maximise this investment.
The challenge could come from brands that use ambush-marketing techniques to raise their own profiles and in the process eroding the big players' share of market voice. This is a worldwide phenomenon and creative agencies will have to keep their thinking caps on to ensure their clients' brands remain in the spotlight.
The World Cup means that corporations and brands that position themselves best in the mind of viewers and consumers before, during, and after the event will be the real winners in the market - long after the football fraternity starts to prepare for Brazil 2014.
[Bizcommunity.co.za 18 Jun 2010 09:24]
The Power of Brands - Greg Satel, Digital Tonto.com
Many digital marketers proclaim that they offer superior value than traditional media by delivering direct response metrics. No touchy-feely image talk, but concrete results. Just the facts ma’am.
That’s a mistake. The world’s premier marketers spend billions every year on brand image campaigns because they make money doing so. Anybody who believes that the profit oriented companies continue to invest because they are subject to some kind of mass delusion is just not thinking clearly.
The bulk of marketing budgets will continue to go toward building brand perceptions because brands are incredibly powerful.
Brand Identity
A few years ago, I got some great first hand experience with how influential brands can be when we commissioned a series of focus groups for our market leading portal and received very interesting responses regarding our news section.
While we got high marks for usability and consumers said they appreciated the convenience of having news on the home page of a general interest portal, we got low marks for quality of the content.
Many said that we didn’t offer serious journalism and the quality of the writing could be improved. They also said that they preferred to read the leading news portal, which offered hard hitting, well written stories. They would read news on our site, but for important issues they preferred the news leader.
What the readers didn’t know was that we also owned the leading news site and were, in fact, simply syndicating the stories from our news brand onto our portal. Both sites featured the same stories written by the same journalists.
It wasn’t the reality that differed, it was the perception.
Brands Promises
The difference in perceptions can be traced to a difference in brand promises.
Our news site was cobranded with a serious news magazine. In addition to the news wire, it offered lots of other news features, including commentary, news video, blogs, etc. Although the newswire made up over 90% of the activity on the site, the extra features and the focus on news created a more weighty environment.
Our portal, on the other hand, featured lots of entertainment oriented services, including dating, funny videos and games as well as e-commerce, sex and career advice, and so on. It promised convenience, fun and a threshold level of quality. People could expect everything on the site to be “good enough,” but not exceptional in any one area.
So while the actual offer of both sites overlapped, the propositions differed and consumers reacted accordingly.
The Tangible Value of Intangibles
Much of the skepticism about brand advertising stems from the fact that you can easily measure direct response to a sales promotion, but brands are intangible. What business wouldn’t want simple metrics with which to evaluate return on marketing investment?
The fact is that business don’t run on metrics, they run on profits and while measuring brand value isn’t straightforward, the value is real nonetheless. Interbrand regularly evaluates financial value for brands and finds that many are worth tens of billions of dollars.
They’re not the only ones. This paper from the Marketing Science Institute estimates that “a one-unit change in the Brand Asset Index is associated with a 4% change in the market value of a firm.” In study after study, brands are shown to be one of the most valuable assets a company can have.
Many marketers monitor brand performance as closely as they do sales performance and spend millions of dollars every year for brand tracking studies. While the math isn’t as straightforward as with direct response, they are more than aware of how brand perceptions affect sales.
Despite what some tech bloggers seem to believe, otherwise astute businesspeople do not throw around billions of dollars of investment every year based on abstract theories.
For the full article http://www.digitaltonto.com/2010/the-power-of-brands/
FIFA - World Unification? or World Domination?
How far should brands and trademark protection be taken? Is Fifa protecting its brand? Or Just getting a reputation for being petty?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8576220.stm
This is a great article & why we shouldn’t shrink in the face of economic challenge..
Invent now
When times are tough, take big risks. This may sound counterintuitive, but it’s what great brands do.
For them, a recession is the best time to launch something new. Look at the last three downturns.
In 1984, Apple launched the Mac, and Virgin launched Virgin Atlantic.
In 1992, Nokia launched its first GSM mobile, the Nokia 1011.
And in 2001, Toyota launched the Prius globally, and Apple launched its iPod.
All went on to create new demand, generate big revenues, and in some way change the world.
Each responded to, and helped shape, the spirit of the age.
At the beginning of the era of deregulation, the Apple Mac and Virgin Atlantic both aimed to free people from the tired old establishment.
At the start of the liberating age of the mobile and the internet, Nokia was a completely fresh brand from social-democratic Scandinavia.
And as blatant consumerism started to wane, the Prius and the iPod were both understated, highly designed ways of showing off.
What does all this tell us? Recessions are a time when entry costs are often lower. But they’re also times when people rethink things, when they’re open to something new – in fact, when they most need something new.
Right now, the best brands should be lining up new things that build their brands, and that shape a new world – things that give individuals new powers, that cross public-private ownership, that are ethically unimpeachable, that aren’t too western, that demand collaboration rather than consumption, that in some way fix the world. As Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said in the London Sunday Times (29 March), ‘There's never been more opportunity… Now we can start again and do things properly’.
by Robert Jones